Yo ho, ho and a box of rum (cake) *

In which our Hero discovers that the cake is a lie. But there’s no sense crying over every mistake; You just keep on trying till you run out of cake.

Nocturne makes faces at me when I write entries like that last one. I’m not supposed to be picking up strange women, even if she’ll tolerate it because I’m rescuing a little one for their mothers. What I am supposed to be doing is writing lovey dovey entries about my wonderful amazing girlfriend.

Which is fine with me, but I’ve kind of been keeping my head down on that matter because the thing I want to tell you about is how I both brilliantly succeeded and completely borked celebrating her most recent birthday, and because I’m tasked with keeping her anonymized, I’ve been waiting for a preselected random number of days to talk about it. (Cause that’s how I roll. Just wait till I anonymize the next upcoming holiday, S-mas.)

Anyway, she’s currently employed sort of like a professional witness in a protection program, which means she’s right now staying in a corporate-apartments style complex in a village that has too little personality for me to come up with a good name for. Which is why I’ve decided to nickname it for my lunch today. Because I am not in Novaya Sushiburg, where she is, and worse, since she’s a vagranttransient, I don’t have any of her people or my people around there to be accomplices. Thus creating the challenge of trying to throw an interesting birthday shindig in a tiny remote place in another country.

Granted, this isn’t the first time she’s been in a one-goat town, but last time it was *so* remote that basically anything I did was going to be like eating an well-done steak through a straw. This time, it was still remote but with a postal connection that gave me some options. And I tried to take advantage.

My brilliant plan consisted of sending her a care package, and then ordering sundries from the local online retailer to add some interesting oomph. And the care package was a success, I think. A little bit of chocolate, a scarf that was so wonderfully soft that I kept petting it while I was packing up the box, a letter, some other chocolate and I forget what else (This is the funny part, as soon as the package leaves, I instantly lose all sense of what I put it in. weird)

Where things fell a little off the rails was that I also decided that I absolutely had to make sure she had a birthday cake. But after a couple of really irritating attempts to try to use my “foreign” credit card, I gave up and instead went back online. And the crappy e-tailer had a remarkably crappy selection of cakes. But I found one. One cake. Out of the hundreds. One cake to rule them all and in the darkness bind them!!

By which I mean, I found one cake that would ship and did not end in the words “Rum Cake” which makes my mouth dry up and my lips try to scuttle away from my face in terror of the incoming flavour! It’s the golden cake rule, Gentle Reader! Cake unto others as you would be caked yourself, excepting of course where others have an allergy you don’t, at which point cake unto yourself because why waste perfectly good cake.

Rum cake. (shudder)

But here is one option, one lonely option, one single option that says… “Tiramisu” And I know. I *know*, Gentle Reader, that any cake that I can order from a retailer and ship to someone in a place that’s not actually called Sushiburg, any cake that has been deemed safe for the rigors of rough storage, and long distance sitting, and rugged aging. It is not going to be the cake of the gods. It’s just going to be the cake of the sucks-less-than-rum-cake.

So I ordered it. And then I thought about it and realized that you can’t have a birthday cake without birthday candles, so I ordered those. And then I was thinking that it’s not like she’s a smoker, how is she going to light those candles. So I got her box of matches. (Happy Buddha Matches. Get it? Happy Buddha? “Happy Buddha to you! Happy Happy Buddha to you!”) And then I was worried that the first set of matches wouldn’t get there in time so I ordered a second set with faster shipping.

Anyway… I’ve ordered all this stuff, and then put together my international package of mystery. And then fired it all off in a shotgun blast of deliveries. With the following outcomes:

1) On a site full of rum cakes, the cake that does not say rum cake is still a rum cake. And my professional tiramisu rum cake taste tester has reported back to me that tiramisu rum cake tastes very little like tiramisu or cake, possibly like rum, and entirely like something that you will proceed to regret putting into your mouth.

2) Happy Buddha is a lot less funny when it isn’t an obscurely late hour of the night.

3) My *actual* package with the *actual* presents and thoughtful care was *actually* not delivered in the promised 2 days but in two weeks. Which we only discovered because Nocturne stopped by her postal office on the third week, after her birthday, the very day they were preparing to return the package to me as unclaimed. On the tracking system it is *still* undelivered. But anyway, the result was that in time for her birthday, my sweetheart got treats like… candles, and inedible cake. And an umbrella, because I’m thoughtful like that and I knew hers had popped in the wind. Thoughtful but not… thought-full. You know? Too practical. Eventually, she got stuff that made her actually “ooh” and “toodle-pip” (still working on finding something that will get an “ahhh.” My best idea so far is a tongue depressor, but that might be like the happy buddha joke.)

4) Way back at the beginning of our acquaintance, Nocturne asked me to draw her a particular picture. And I tried, and I failed, and I tried and I failed. And for years, I’ve had this thing in my mind, to draw her her picture, and give her a silly, funny, hand-crafted piece to her present. So I drew, and I drew. The staggering number of hours and sketches that went into drawing her that picture will both amaze and horrify, because the result was… not good. I mean, not awful, but I printed the picture onto this fancy-pants card stock that I picked up because hey, bet she’d smile to finally get that picture on a birthday card. Except printing it, on the special paper, resulted in a very… blah… picture.

But in all of that, despite the sheer number of thing that didn’t go according to plan, despite the fact that I let myself get tunnel-visioned into overlooking some very reasonable options for remote-controlled cake deliveration, despite the fact that her birthday-card was more blobby than animally, despite the late parcel, and the rum cake, most of all despite the rum cake, Nocturne told me that she liked the thought I put into it.

And let me tell you, in the romance business, “You were really sweet to try” is not a gold medal finish. (For that matter, I’ve got a laundry list of “next time” thoughts) But it’s a nice change from being in the doghouse despite putting in a great deal of work. I like that.

*EDIT*

On rereading, my fixation on the cake thing made me completely forget to mention that she *loved* the care package I sent, and was pretty excited about some of the practical things too. She agrees that the scarf is ridiculously soft, and the chocolates are very tasty (which is why I didn’t get any for myself) and her favourite bit was in fact the letter I sent along with the bundle.

Oh! And she sent me a letter. Scented. Absolutely nothing to do with her birthday, I just liked that.